CUPdate 100: Project Recap & Reflection

Back in April 2021, my friends and I decided to start a project where we would meet bi-weekly to talk about our projects and what we were working on... and that became tradition for our CUPdates project. We've been keeping up with it and meeting for 5 years now and made a big milestone to CUPdate 100!

While I usually take these CUPdates to talk about what I'm currently working on, I wanted to turn this into a rapid-fire recap of the past 5 years to reflect on projects I've made and where I'm at today.

My first CUPdate post started with a variety of projects and one of those being that I was getting into video editing more and updating my YouTube page. As a throwback to that, I decided it'd be best to start this out with a video that's ~100 seconds long to summarize the 100 CUPdates.

The first few CUPdates were honestly a mix of jumping around projects since I didn't really have a main project I was working on for the year other than Eventure Twines. Then, I spent about 4 months working on a bigger personal game project, Compass Nays.

For the rest of that first year, I worked on a few smaller projects on the side while working towards my bigger first Eventure Twine. So I created a short Unity project called Frank Hawk.

I also worked on our OC trading card game for a bit, including printing off paper prototypes and testing it.

And the final big project of 2021 was The Gek Eventure Twine. This was the start of my yearly tradition to create at least 1-2 of these. This one was one of the longer ones too!

In 2022, I officially converted all of our Eventures to Google Docs, which is how I pretty much solely view them now. I was drawing a lot more storyboard sketches of Eventure moments as well. I didn't know at the time that this would turn into my yearly projects too.

For the Global Game Jam, we created Prisoners of Time Fabric, which was also the start of fixing up projects after the GGJ ended. I worked on Compass Nays a bit more, but not a whole lot.

I was still hopping between projects like writing The Nays, working on games, and drawing. I wrote a lot of Eventures and worked on The Nays a lot in 2022. I started my monthly digital sketchbook drawings this year also, since I was trying to draw daily at that point. I did this for about a year or so.

I spent a month this year creating Spirits of Combination Village, my game in the IGMC game jam. This was what really spiked my interest in creating a solo game a year.

To end 2022, I created the Cimc Eventure Twine, which was the second one I finished so far (chronologically).

I started 2023 with some goals to draw more because I got Colors Live, so I was drawing on my Switch a bit in the first few months.

I was going through a lot of health issues in 2022-2023 and got 2 surgeries within a year, but I was still creating. I did the GGJ for 2023 while laying down mostly post-surgery, but we ended up making Tag World Roots.

In 2023, I started my yearly tradition of creating a project that I was documenting privately throughout the year because it was a Christmas gift for my brother. So those CUPdates weren't necessarily public until months later. This was when I created my GameBoy game, The Nays Origins.

This was also the first year that I completed 2 Eventure Twines by October. This was likely because my health was much better and I started these projects pretty much at the start of the year. This was really the start of my goals to finish projects yearly!

  

At this point, my years have started to follow the same formula in terms of yearly recap posts, goals for the year, Global Game Jam that has a few weeks of clean-up afterwards, creating multiple Twines, and creating another solo project. So for 2024, my GGJ project was Biggert City Battle Show.

And then began my yearly project: Nay Saga. This was one of the most ambitious and it turned into 15 devlog posts, so the majority of 2024.

In between, I did two Eventure Twines (The Night Kids and The Gek's Rival), and a very quick solo game jam. But these were all a lot shorter dev times in between Nay Saga, since that was my focus throughout the year.

For 2025, I did GGJ again and made my favorite game we've made so far: World Bub. It was more ambitious, but I really like how this one came out. And with our post-GGJ updates, it turned into a full game.

So after that, I made a mini project in Pixel Game Maker MV using the same assets to learn that software.

I also participated in the RPG Maker Game Jam, where I created #No_Hacks.

And I finished my 2 Eventure Twines earlier this year: The Gek's Favorite Eventure and Complex.Net Eventure.

 

During those other projects, I was also working on my yearly project, which was another card game: Escape From Tag World. It was mostly in the background until July when I was full-on developing it, but I did technically start it in December of the previous year.

I also took a break for a couple of weekends to work on some mini-games in Unity with my brother on a side project called Nay 50. We made 3 mini-games over 2 weekends, so they were kind of like mini-game jams.

At the end of 2025, I started a variety of game dev projects. This turned into my CUPdates throughout some of the start of 2026 when I was more ready to show the projects, like a creature collection plugin I was working on. I learned how to make RPG Maker plugins and was finally able to create some that I could use for my projects.

Then it led into our big 2026 project: remaking The Note Competition, one of our GGJ projects. So I spent a bit of time just updating and converting the project and that's what I imagine a lot of my CUPdates for the rest of this year will be around.

Aside from that project, we also worked on our most ambitious GGJ project to date: Macca Masquerade. Usually we spend a couple of weekends or a week fixing up our projects, but this involved at least a month after the GGJ before we were ready to share it.

Then after that project, I took a mini-break to work on an OC personality quiz.

And that's the CUPdates so far from 1 - 100! I usually do reflections at the end of each year, but I'm taking this moment to reflect a bit as it's almost halfway through 2026.

The CUPdates project has really helped motivate me to keep working on projects and finish things. I feel the pressure of wanting to present something to my friends each time, so I work hard to have something to show. At the start, it was really any project, but it's evolved into showcasing my larger projects.

Like I mentioned above, 2023 is really when I started to get into a rhythm and have been structuring my years the same way ever since then. While I really like the structure, I will admit, I've maybe started to get a little too ambitious in some areas, and could probably scope back a bit to avoid burnout. I realize that was when I started to do a lot more because my health was improving, but I don't want to go backwards by overdoing it.

So this year is kind of breaking some of the trends. I'll be honest, I'm not working on any secret projects really yet for this year, so I've kind of been taking a step back because of how intense GGJ was this year. And for our big game project, we scoped it out so the goal is to release it in 2027, which gives us more time. We're aiming for a demo this year, but I think that's manageable. If not, we can always change that scope or timeline if we need more time too since it's not super urgent or anything. I figured we can reassess once we get deeper into development, if needed. Until we're fully into development, it's still not clear how long we'll actually need.

Just looking back and reflecting on how many games I made in 2025, I'm starting to really connect the dots on why I should maybe slow down a bit and that it's okay if I need a break. Honestly I've felt a little guilty these past few months because I haven't been working on my projects really and I've mostly been taking a break because I've been tired. But I think it'll be okay as long as I can get this demo out by the fall, like we planned. Or at least figure out the scope of it soon once we officially start development and move past the pre-production phase. Outside of that, I'm really trying to keep it pretty low-key this year.

The past 3 years have had really intensive 1-year-long projects (on top of a bunch of other mini-projects!) so I think it's okay to put those on the back-burner for a bit until I'm ready to come back to something bigger. If anything, I'd like to give myself some space to do mini-projects that aren't as intensive when I need them, and really find ways to reignite my passion again.

I noticed for some of my longer projects that I did start losing motivation towards the end, but with shorter projects I didn't really run into that issue. And then on some of my longer on-going projects like writing The Nays, I don't ever seem to lose motivation, but rather, it unlocks passion within me that makes me fall in love with the project more every time I work on it. As it should be obvious by this point, I realize the longer I go without writing or working on the core story of The Nays, the less motivated in general on projects that I become. I do need to find the time to work on The Nays more so I can get some of that motivation back throughout the years to help keep my motivation going on these projects. It just always feels "lowest priority" because it doesn't have a deadline, but it's really what keeps me going.

I also noticed that whenever I do a mini-project, ranging from 1-2 days or under 30 hours, I don't seem to get burnt out on those projects, especially compared to my 100+ hour projects. So this is something I want to be open to when inspiration hits, so I can experiment and allow myself to work on something outside of bigger projects. This can help keep that motivation going throughout the year. I'm hoping to allow myself to be less rigid than I have been so I can bring the passion back into more projects outside of The Nays.

Generally, I'm realizing that with my schedules over the past few years, it takes about 3 months for the Eventure Twines and about 3-4 months for my yearly project. This means means those months that are solely (or mostly) dedicated to the project without a lot on the side. So the remaining ~4 months can be gap projects or working on The Nays. I also need to remind myself of which times of year are most busy. For example, my work is most hectic every year in April-June, so I really shouldn't expect myself to exert a lot of energy into my personal projects during those months. But instead, those should be my recovery months where I allow myself to just play games or do side projects without pressure on my personal projects if I'm already having a lot of pressure at work during that time. Same with November-December where there's a lot going on for the holidays. I've honestly been struggling with personal projects in May, and connecting the dots again, it's because of that extra stress at work. So I'm slowly allowing myself to take breaks and trying hard to not feel guilty about it.

So anyway, I know this has been a pretty long and reflective post, but it's something I wanted to do to make CUPdate 100 special. Huge shout out to my friends Jinny, Hillary, and Laura for coming along with me for the ride so far in our CUPdates project. They've been really supportive and listened to me rant bi-weekly about my projects, so I'm thankful for that.

I'm happy to continue doing this as long as we can, and looking forward to sharing more big milestones in the years to come!

WING Competition Early Devlog 3: Logo Design & Steam Setup

I took a bit of a break from brainstorming for this project to work on a few other projects, including a couple of months on clean-up for our GGJ26 project, a personality quiz game, and some travel.

Once we wrapped up those projects and took a break, I slowly transitioned back into working on The Note Competition remake... which we're still figuring out a name for. Right now the code name is "WING Competition", but we may need to workshop it a bit more. I was still just working on this on and off while things have been busy the past few months, so this post will have a variety of small things working up to the bigger project.

To start back in, I was thinking about some of the expenses and marketing side of things. I was thinking about us making some social media posts, so I started making some accounts and things to prepare. With that, we decided we might want to redo our logo for The Gek Games. Right now it looks a little too similar to The Nays because we're using that same drawing of The Gek. So to make it a little different, I sketched a few thumbnail ideas for logo concepts.

I took some of those sketchbook drawings into Photoshop and started to turn them into digital versions. These were really rough, but I wanted to figure out the overall layout/feel before I got too far. Some of the designs I liked more originally ended up looking a little busy when I turned them to digital.

Then I took the bottom-right one and cleaned it up a bit and then tried out a few fonts. I was leaning towards the bottom-left but still wasn't sure if it's too busy.

I analyzed other game studio logos and decided to try one that's a bit more simplified with less going on so it could be a bit cleaner and easier to read. So this is what I ended up with for now!

I also started going through the process of making our Steam account! Since it requires many days to verify and have everything go through, I wanted to get that all set up early on so we could start testing the Steamworks SDK while we're developing the game. So I got our account all set up and verified so we officially have access to Steamworks.

Then, because of some of the things I learned from our GGJ26 project, I made a couple of spreadsheets to just organize our information like characters in the database and pictures used. It was honestly pretty refreshing to look back at this project after our intensive GGJ project this year because I set everything up not on a time crunch, so the project files and events were a lot more organized and well-documented. It's also a lot less complicated so far.

I also decided to dive into Steam integration more with some RPG Maker plugins. It was a lot of research, but I eventually found out I had to downgrade my NW.js to version 49.1. I found a few plugins that would help with adding Greenworks, but it wasn't until I found Undermax's Steam Link plugin that I was actually able to figure it all out. Their project file was set up with everything needed so I didn't have to go hunt down a lot of external files. And finally, I got something working where I could print the user's name! I still need to try achievements, DLC, and a few other things, but it was a great start to making sure we could get it all working.

Then we spent a whole night doing a brainstorming session! I'd say this was the start of the "official" development for this game. We really honed in on deciding the new theme and idea for the gameplay and overarching story. We bounced ideas around earlier of transitioning it to be about Tag World instead of PS World, but then we thought... what if it was multiple Worlds? So we decided you'd be riding a linkship around Worlds and be competing in some kind of competition across Worlds instead of it all being in Tag World. This could still keep the competition you're competing in as "WING" being the acronym and still make sense. And it allows us to include a lot more unique locations without being tied to Tag World specifically. It could be a few other acronyms like LINK or CIPO also, so we're not sure which one to go with yet.

I spent some time after our brainstorming session organizing all of our notes into a more official Game Design Document. We've been kind of just having a stream of consciousness notes in our document while talking, so I wanted to really hone in and organize our thoughts a bit better so we could have a more clear direction. So I made a new tab for the GDD and started to organize those notes and drop screenshots and images in whenever we referenced something so it'd be easier for us to keep track of and fully flesh out these ideas more.

Since we made an asset list, I started drawing the character sprite for the second playable character, Urom. We compiled a list of inspirations, so I used those as a guide for coming up with a few variations to try things out. I ended up kind of liking the middle one the most since it seems to have the most personality and shapes that fit.

Then I did very quick sketches of all of the characters we had planned. I was mainly trying to get sizes down in relation to each other and based on the middle Urom sprite above so I could try and get those figured out roughly.

I also saved these out as charsets so I could import them directly into the game and get some of those tests there for getting things set up.

Then I started to sketch some of the menu layouts while figuring out what the map layouts could look like. I'm still not sure how the battles are going to look, so we'll have to do a lot of experimenting there.

From there, I wanted to figure out the hub world and some of the basic ideas like challenging the enemy or the VS screen.

I also briefly revisited my debug log plugin because I noticed a couple of bugs with it affecting how you can close the game. So I updated it to allow you to close the game when you're on the title screen or when it's crashing. I also added a new crash report so it'll save a log if the game crashes and print the console error to the log. And it has more information included like the last called event ID and event command and the names of the variables and switches.

I also updated it to add functionality to connect with Google Scripts. This allows us to collect anonymous generic game data such as how long the game was played, what their party was, and if there were any crash errors. And I added a plugin command to call it anywhere in case I ever wanted to get a log at a certain point in the game.

Once I got back from a few trips and busy times, I decided to figure out a rough schedule for the next couple of years. That way, I could have weekly goals that I'm working towards to make sure I know where we're headed on the project. I added some milestone goals for us and deadlines. It's already started to shift quite a bit since I made this and I'm sure it'll continue to as we start working on the mechanics more, but I wanted to get something in there as a starting point so I could better scope and figure out where to start.

And that's where we're at currently! We're still very much in the rough planning stages for this project. Our personal lives have been really busy with work and travel, so that's been delaying progress a bit from our original milestones. But we're not in a huge rush to release this, so if there end up being delays that bump things a bit, I'm not too worried about it.

Our new goal is to officially start full development on this by June, since that's when our life happenings will likely settle down a little bit. At that point, I'm planning to really dedicate a lot more time to it. Until then, I might have a few side project CUPdates in the weeks to come if I'm not working on this quite yet, so stay tuned!